CHAPTER 23
Clay
It was only thanks to the Green in his veins that he was able to make out much of anything below the surface. The undulating lake-bed stretched away beneath him, featureless but for a sand-covered hump almost directly below. He angled his body towards the hump and kicked with all the enhanced strength his body would allow. His objective became clearer as he descended, resolving into something vaguely boat-shaped. It was almost entirely covered by silt but for one section near its narrow prow that appeared to have been scraped away.
A gondola, he realised as he swam closer, the sight of a hatch resolving through the murk, an open hatch. An aerostat’s gondola.
Clay’s lungs began to burn as he forced his body lower, coming to a thrashing halt a good forty feet short. Got too much air in me, he knew as a renewed bout of kicking failed to push him any lower. He stopped moving, focusing his gaze on the half-open hatch and reaching out with Black. It took two hard tugs before the hatch came free revealing something round and shiny in the gloom within. Kriz, Clay thought, recognising the helmet and using Black to draw her out of the gondola. His vision was already beginning to blur thanks to the lack of air and there was no time for finesse. Kriz’s helmet thumped against the side of the hatchway as he dragged her clear, opening his arms to catch her as she shot upwards.
She sagged in his grasp, limp and unmoving but he could feel the faint beat of her heart as his hands pressed against her chest. Clay’s hands fumbled at the weighted belt about her waist for a few agonising seconds before it came free. He began to kick for the surface when something fast and large streaked out of the gloom directly ahead, Clay having time to register the sight of two triangular rows of teeth before instinctively unleashing his Black. The Green recoiled as if it had charged into a brick wall, blood seeping like crimson smoke from its nostrils as it twisted and vanished into the gloom, tail whipping.
Clay twisted about, seeing a sleek narrow shape cut through the murk a short distance away, quickly followed by another moving in the opposite direction. They’re circling, he realised, head swivelling left and right. His body spasmed then as the product in his veins started to thin in earnest, lungs now like fire, the Greens coming closer with every circle. He knew with awful certainty that the attack would come soon and all at once, the whole pack rending and tearing at the hated intruders in a frenzy. It was as if they knew his product was fading and all they had to do was wait.
Panic rising he lashed out with Red at the closest drake, leaving a lightning-fork-like trail of bubbles through the water. The Green veered away, more in confusion than distress as Clay could see no apparent damage to the beast. Stupid, he thought, skin prickling in the suddenly warm water. Boil them and you boil yourself. Which left only the Black, and there were too many to push away.
He convulsed again, clamping his mouth shut against his body’s instinctive need to gasp. A strange, reflective calm overtook him then, the panic vanishing as the imminence of death became a certainty. A last serene notion slipped into his head as he felt Kriz begin to slip from his arms. Too many to push . . . Then don’t push, pull . . . Pull the water.
Water. More substantial than air, which could be affected by Black but only in the most unfocused way. Water was different, water could be pulled.
Clay used the last vestiges of his reason to marshal his Black, focusing his attention on the space separating them from the drakes, then expending it all at once to draw the water towards them. The effect was immediate and dramatic, the pressure of so much water compressing at once shooting the pair of them to the surface.
They broke through into a cacophony of sound and beautiful, sweet-tasting air. Clay heard his uncle call out before they plunged down. He kicked for the surface and dragged more air into his lungs as they bobbed back up. He could see the raft a little over ten yards away, which suddenly seemed a great distance in light of what lurked beneath. Uncle Braddon and Preacher were both kneeling, rifles pointed in his direction whilst Sigoral stood to the side, tipping a vial of product down his throat. Clay began to call out for a rope but the yell died as Sigoral cast the vial aside and focused his gaze. Clay felt the invisible hand of Black close around him and a heart-beat later he and Kriz were being dragged through the water at a considerable rate of knots.
Braddon and Preacher fired several shots in the time it took for them to reach the raft, Sigoral lifting them clear of the lake at the last instant to deposit them in the centre of the raft. Clay was forced to spend some time gasping for breath before he began to get the helmet off Kriz’s head.
“I got it,” Braddon said, crouching to pull the helmet clear, revealing Kriz’s slack, unresponsive features. Braddon held a hand to her mouth then, muttering a curse, lay her flat on her back and delivered several hard shoves to her sternum with both hands. Clay’s gaze was dragged away by a sudden commotion, turning to see a Green frozen in mid-leap close to the edge of the raft. Sigoral held the beast in place long enough to aim his carbine and put a bullet through its skull. The lieutenant cast the Green’s corpse away and Clay turned back, watching his uncle pumping Kriz’s chest.
“Must’ve had some air left in the helmet,” Clay said, knowing it was a desperate notion. “I felt her heart-beat, Uncle.”
Braddon said nothing, continuing his rhythmic shoves, Kriz’s head lolling in response with not even a flicker to her eyelids. He kept at it until Preacher’s rifle fell silent a minute or so later. Braddon sat back on his haunches, turning to Clay with a grim shake of his head. “I . . .”
All four of them started as Kriz jerked, a gout of water erupting from her mouth. She spent some time convulsing, breath coming in deep, saw-like rasps, eventually choking into a bout of violent coughing. Clay moved to clasp her hand as she continued to cough, finding it closed into a tight fist.
“I . . . I found them,” she said when the coughing had subsided, meeting Clay’s gaze with a bright smile. She opened her fist to reveal two objects. One was a small crystal shard, little bigger than an arrow-head, and the other a glass vial. Clay initially took it for product but the colour was strange, possessed of a rainbow-like sheen as it caught the light.
“What are they?” he asked.
Kriz’s smile broadened and she reached out with her other hand to caress his face. “The keys . . . to convergence.”
“Seems we came an awful long way for such small things.” Loriabeth peered at the two objects in Kriz’s palm with a dubious gaze.
“Density is relative and often deceptive,” Kriz replied. “Everything you can see or touch is made up of mostly empty space.” She sat huddled close to the camp-fire, a blanket about her shoulders. They had retreated a good distance from the lake-shore before making camp, Kriz having to be carried most of the way. She had shivered continually during the trip and even now spoke with a pronounced tremor to her voice. “I need Black,” she said, looking at Clay.
He frowned, concerned by her wan face and red, over-bright eyes. “You don’t want to wait awhile . . . ?”
“Black.” She held out her free hand, continuing in her own language, “As you know, I have waited a very long time for this and find myself out of patience.”
Clay duly handed over a vial of Black, Kriz drinking a quarter of the contents before focusing her gaze on the crystal sitting in her palm. It floated free and drifted away from her then seemed to shimmer as it began to vibrate, Clay detecting a familiar tinkling sound he had last heard in their trance in the hidden enclave. The rest of the company let out a mingling of gasps and surprised profanity as the crystal abruptly unfolded. Narrow spikes lanced out from the core, catching the fire-light as it spun under Kriz’s manipulation, eventually slowing to hang serenely in the air, resembling a star in the way it glittered. Clay stepped closer to it, memory racing with recognition. The trance in which Kriz had shown him the cavern where Zembi had created the first White, the four crystals, Red, Green, Blue . . . and one so dark it seemed to swallow the light.
“The Black crystal,” he said, reaching out to press a tentative finger to one of the spikes. “We actually Seer-damn found it.”
“Kinda begs the question of what we do with it,” Braddon said, moving closer to peer at the crystal.
“It will enable communication,” Kriz said. “Between drake and human, specifically Black drakes and humans.”
“Clay can already do that,” Skaggerhill said.
“Only with Lutharon,” Clay said. “And that was thanks to Miss Ethelynne. If he’d stayed with us any longer things would’ve gone bad sooner or later, for us and him.” He turned to Kriz. “We can command them with this, right? Make them join us?”
She shook her head. “Of all the pure-bred species the Blacks were always the hardest to control, more intelligent than the others and more aggressive towards humans. This was partially why Father was never able to successfully cross-breed them. The White contains blood lines from all drake species, except the Black.”
“Guess that’s why they didn’t join its war,” Clay said. “And why they fought him when he rose before, fought alongside the people who lived here to bring him down.”
“That I can’t explain,” Kriz replied. “It’s clear that the world my people built fell, and the civilisation that grew in its place was able to achieve some kind of symbiosis with the drakes.”
“Heart-blood.” Clay remembered the mosaic from the hidden city that lay on the far side of the lake. “Their queen would drink heart-blood and bond with a Black. That’s what bound them together. With this”—he nodded at the crystal—“we won’t have to.”
He heard his uncle let out a faint groan and turned to find him frowning in grim realisation.
“Captain?” Skaggerhill asked.
“He means we’re gonna have to go find us some Blacks,” Braddon said, “to make friends with.”
“That’s what you need?” Clay asked later, nodding at the glass vial in Kriz’s hand. The others were all sleeping, Clay and Kriz having taken the first watch. She had returned the Black crystal to its original state and now sat regarding the vial in one hand and the blade-shaped shard in the other. “You drink that and you can unlock the memories Zembi put in there?” he went on.
“Yes,” she said, her eyes tracking from the shard to the vial but making no move to drink it.
“Is it dangerous?” he asked, sensing her reluctance and switching to her language.
“All knowledge is dangerous, but all knowledge is precious. The contradiction at the heart of everything the Philos Caste studied or created.”
“Convergence,” Clay said. “What is it?”
Kriz was silent for a time, turning the vial over in her fingers, face rapt. “Does this look like drake blood to you?” she asked, holding the vial out to him. He took it, holding it up so the fire-light illuminated the contents.
“Kinda,” he said, handing it back. “Looks a little like one of the more expensive Ironship dilutions. Colour’s different, though.”
“Then it might surprise you to know that no part of what is in this vial came from a drake, except the knowledge of how to make it. This is what your people call product, Clay. It will do everything Blue will do, but it was not syphoned from the corpse of some unfortunate beast. It was made.
“Zembi believed that the abilities of the Blood-blessed lay dormant in all of us. What else could explain the random nature of the Blessing? If only a small proportion of the population developed the ability during early adolescence, an ability they clearly didn’t inherit, then the same potential rested in all of us. If the right formula could be found, it could unlock that potential. Think of it, Clay, a whole world of people able to share their thoughts, craft wonders, walk this earth without fear. This is what we were working for all those years under the ice. This is the key to convergence. This”—she held up the vial once more—“is synthetic product. Anyone can drink it and harness the power it holds. Not just the Blessed. Anyone.”
“The White,” Clay said. “You needed it to make this?”
She lowered her gaze, Clay seeing a mirror of the shame he had seen on the face of her younger self in the trance. It’s unfair of me to despise you so, she had told the sickly White as it glared at her from the pit. Like you, it appears I should never have been born. “There is more than just drake blood in the White,” she said.
It took him a moment to realise the import of what she had said, a chilly fist closing around his heart as the implications struck home. “People,” he said in a slow, hard rasp. “You used people to make that thing.”
“Not people. Human tissue, mostly unfertilised eggs and plasma. Zembi had developed a method of blending organic material at the microscopic level. Another barely understood gift from the crystals. It took years, there were many failures.” Kriz’s head lowered farther still, voice dropping to nearly a whisper. “Many . . . things were brought into this world, things we are fortunate did not live for more than a few minutes after hatching. Then came the first White, and Zembi thought he had his discovery, the ultimate triumph of the Philos Caste. Its blood was unique, much easier to study than the other breeds. It gave us clues as to how to formulate synthetic compounds, clues we would never have had if it hadn’t been born.”
“But it got out, while you slept it got out, turned him into a Spoiled and somehow made it to Arradsia.”
“All knowledge is dangerous, all knowledge is precious.” Kriz looked again at the shard in her hand. “At least now we have a chance to discover how it got out.”
“Could be he only had that thing because the White allowed it. Maybe it wanted him to give it to you. For all we know you’ll drop down dead the moment you enter the trance.”
Kriz jerked her chin at Preacher’s sleeping form on the other side of the camp-fire. “Your friend gave us a lesson in faith the other day. Maybe it’s one we should heed.”
“Faithful he surely is, but he’s also crazy.” Clay reached out, placing his hand over hers to cover the vial and the shard. “Don’t. At least not here, not now. Wait till we’re back on the ship, or at least somewhere that could be called civilised. We got what we came for.”
She gave a small grin, slipping back into her accented Mandinorian to ask, “That an order, Captain?”
“If you like. We got a long way to go and a better chance of surviving this trip with three Blood-blessed ’stead of two.”
She gently pushed his hand away and looked again at the items in her hand before nodding and consigning them to the pocket of her jacket. “As you wish. I wouldn’t want anyone calling me a mutineer.”
In the morning he woke in time for his trance with Zenida Okanas, spending several minutes in contemplation of the vial in his hand. It did happen, he thought, replaying the events at the lake in his head. I tranced without drinking. But how? There was only one explanation that made any sense. Heart-blood. He had been able to maintain a mental connection with Jack from the moment he drank Blue heart-blood, and what else could that be called but a kind of trance? If he could trance with a drake, why not a human?
Checking his watch to confirm the moment had arrived, he shrugged and returned the Blue vial to his wallet. One way to find out.
Closing his eyes he concentrated on Zenida’s face, reasoning it would summon enough memories of her to establish the connection. Nothing happened. He tried to recall every interaction with the Varestian woman, discovering they were few in number, just enough in fact to forge enough of a connection for the Blue-facilitated trance. Looks like I need something more for this one, he decided, pondering that moment on the raft again. The trance with Kriz had seemed to occur naturally, without any conscious decision, as if his fear for her had reached down to the bottom of the lake and forced its way into her mind. Fear . . . Fear is an emotion. When they first met, Lizanne had tutored him on the basics of the trance, explaining that mental communication required some form of emotional connection between the two parties. It’s how we remember one another in the real world, she said. Not through faces but feelings, however slight. Think of all the people you must have met in your life. Now ask yourself how many you remember. Comparatively few, I imagine. You remember those who made you laugh, those who made you cry, and, especially in your case, Mr. Torcreek, apparently those who made you angry most of all.
Anger, another emotion. Zenida had never made him angry, nor had she made him laugh, except during those times she directed her occasionally caustic observations at Captain Hilemore . . . An image blossomed in his mind then, Hilemore’s face, rendered in much more detail than Clay could have recalled. The captain, it transpired, had a small mole on his chin Clay had never noticed. But she did, he realised. This ain’t my memory. It’s hers. Hilemore’s our connection.
He summoned his much more plentiful supply of Hilemore-related memories, all shot through with the conflicting range of emotions the captain always birthed in him, from grudging admiration to consternation to, most of all, anger.
Zenida’s mindscape arrived with disorienting swiftness, the jewel-encrusted ship filling his vision in a flash and Clay stumbling as he felt its boards beneath his boots. He let out a delighted laugh at the sight of Zenida herself, standing near the prow and regarding him with a half-baffled, half-amused expression.
Are you alright? she asked. The captain will be dismayed to discover the Interior has driven you mad.
We wouldn’t want that, Clay replied. I know how you’d hate to disappoint him, and all.
Zenida’s expression hardened into something that reminded Clay this was a very dangerous woman if the mood took her, and this was her mind.
Just a bad joke, he said, raising his hands. I got some interesting news to share, if you’re ready.
“The Carnstadt Mountains,” Braddon said, gloved finger tapping the map. The mountains lay south-west of the Torquils, a considerable distance from their current location.
“That’s an awful long way, Uncle,” Clay pointed out.
“You want Blacks, that’s where you’ll find ’em. Largest concentration anywhere on the continent. There are pockets in the Coppersoles and the Cragmines on the far western coast, but this is the only place you’re guaranteed a Black kill.”
“’Cept we ain’t going to kill ’em,” Loriabeth put in. “We’re going to make nice and ask them to join up to fight the White, iffen you can believe it. Not sure I do, so the Seer’s ass knows what they’ll think of it.” Seeing Preacher stiffen at the blasphemy she added, “Sorry,” in a low mumble.
“They’re a rambunctious lot to be sure,” Skaggerhill said. “Blacks grow big and mean in those mountains. Cunning too. Longrifles took a pass through the foot-hills a few years back. Lost a marksman and a gunhand with only two kills to show for it.”
“Still a profitable trip by my recollection,” Braddon said, a faint note of annoyance in his voice. “Good news is,” he continued, turning back to Clay, “we don’t have no Spoiled to worry about twixt here and there. Just a whole lotta Cerath wrangling and walking in between.” He lowered his voice to add, “Skaggs is right, though. Next to the Red Sands it’s just about the worst country I ever contracted in. Had hoped never to set eyes on the place again.”
Clay looked at the map. The distance was dismaying but if they were to make this expedition count for something he couldn’t see any other option. “I tranced with Captain Okanas this morning,” he said. “The Superior’s making for Stockcombe.” He tapped the dot a hundred miles or so south of the Carnstadts. “So we have to get there and the route leads us past the mountains in any case.”
He clapped his uncle’s shoulder and moved away, eyes roaming the surrounding plain. “Looks like we got some mounts to find. Lieutenant, I believe it’s your turn to tame the bull.”